Goddamn Brownies

Recently in Gastonia, North Carolina a couple was arrested after being found "going at it" in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Sex acts in public are nothing all that new, but the age difference between the couple is the kicker. The mugshots paint a pretty picture too.



It turns out Asia Marie Howard, 25, was paid $20 to blow Mr. William Walter Stephens, 83, in his Buick. You expect prostitutes to troll truck stops and seedy areas, but I never figured a Wal-Mart parking lot the place for working girls. Though I'm not surprised.

The officer on the scene stopped them as they were leaving the parking lot, after they had been seen having sex in the aformentioned car. At least he let them finish, I'm sure that is not a sight one would want to see up close. You would think the charge would be prostitution since Howard admitted to being paid for the oral sex, but not in North Carolina. The charge - crime against nature. Yep, in some states certain sex acts, other than missionary I presume, are still illegal. This includes anal, oral, bestiality, necrophilia and in some cases homosexual acts. I understand not wanting to see anything like this in a public place, but if two consenting adults want to have a little ass sex, what is the big deal?

I remember around the time I graduated from high school there was a sexual arrest made in the parking lot of Wal-Mart in Burleson. A nineteen year old guy, who I knew, was caught getting hot and heavy with a thirteen year old girl in his car. Way to screw up your life for some action. He is still registered as a sex offender, as confirmed by the website, and just went in for his yearly check-in and photo update on his 30th birthday last week. How can you ever enjoy a birthday again when you know you have to go have your new sex offender picture taken?

On Monday I went to Fry's Electronics to purchase a washer and dryer for the new house. Having full size connections, and a place for them, is going to be awesome! I do love Fry's but it is kind of a love/hate relationship. Sometimes when you go in the staff is overly helpful, but most of the time when you actually need assistance it is like a freaking ghost town.

This was, of course, one of those times.

Jenny and I already picked the model we wanted so all I needed to do was buy them and schedule the delivery. After about five minutes of walking around the large appliances and slamming doors to try and get some attention I went on the hunt for a sales associate. I found some young guy stocking and told him I needed help buying a washer and dryer. "What kind of help do you need with that," he asked. "I need to buy them."

Blank stare.

Then I explained I knew what I wanted, I just needed to make the purchase. He went for help and soon a manager came over to me. She was very helpful and about ten to fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the register with the papers they needed to finalize everything.

When I handed the pages to the guy at the register he looked at them, back at me, back at the pages and then sighed. "Is this all they gave you?" What the hell kind of question is that? Why would I not give him something they gave me? Did I lose it in the two minutes it took to walk to the front and wait in the short line? I told him that was it, and then he asked if I was sure. Bah. He had to go make a copy of something and then he came back and we finished the transaction.

I do not understand people sometimes. I am sure there is not a crazy I.Q. test you have to pass to work retail, but can we please weed out the morons?

I had a couple of DVDs on order from Amazon. No rush needed so I was waiting on the slow free shipping. A couple days ago I got the shipping confirmation and was expecting them anytime. On my way out to the bank I stopped by the mailboxes at my apartment complex.

Most of you know what apartment mailboxes look like, the wall, or walls, of small boxes in a central location. My box is on the bottom level and as I approached it there was something on the ground. I picked up the white package, flipped it over and it was my package from Amazon. What the hell?! I opened my mailbox and there was plenty of room. I can understand if the postman left the parcel on my doorstep or left me a note that I have to pick it up at the post office, but not this. Just drop this on the ground in the main common area of the complex. I'm sure no on ever steals stuff like this. Riiiiight.

After fuming for a few minutes I thought about calling the post office and complaining, but I wonder what good that will really do. My dad did work as a mailman for many, many years and I know all about the slaps on the wrist they get. Even if some action was taken what if my mail carrier is the kind who starts to fuck with me because I got him in trouble? Yeah, it's unethical and against the law to tamper with the mail, but that doesn't stop everyone. The service where I live now is bad enough as it is, I cannot afford for it to get any worse. I gave a couple of Netflix returns to my mailman one time and, surprise, they never made it back to the distribution center. I really hope I get this rent house (which I should know by the end of the week) because then there will, hopefully, be less snail mail shenanigans.

What should I do?

This is something I bitch about an awful lot, and it will probably happen with every idiot I run into while watching a film. Tonight I went to the Magnolia to watch the AFI Film Festivals Midnight Shorts program. These are all genre shorts and the place was packed. Since all films are up for an audience award the crowd is given ballots to rate the seven shorts.

This woman and her husband sit down to my right and it soon becomes apparent that I should have told her the seats were taken. Evidently their attention span/memory is not that great because instead of waiting until the end of the program they had to rate each entry as it ended. We are all in a blackened theater so this involves a tiny flashlight. It is incredibly annoying when people check their phone while watching a movie, just imagine that with a fucking flashlight! After two instances I thought she would get the idea when I put my hand up to block the light. She even went so far as to apologize, but that did not stop her.

I was going to say something, but I really did not want to start an argument while I was trying to enjoy what was on the screen. I let it slide, but next time something like this happens, and I'm not wearing a press badge, I might have to kill.

Why the hell can no one at a freaking grocery store correctly sack the groceries?! Aside from Central Market and Whole Foods I never get anyone who knows what they are doing. Maybe I am just lucky at the couple of good stores, but they seem to be the only ones.

I bring my own bag to the store. Sure, I'm helping out the environment or something, but basically they hold more than the plastic bags and are easier to carry. When I walk up to the register I begin to stack my items on the conveyor belt in the order they would best fit in the bag. I have had the clueless put the goddamn eggs in the bag first! Is that not Grocery Sacking 101? Tonight the kid did put the half gallon carton of milk in first - on its side!

A couple months ago while checking out I realized I would need a second bag because I was buying too many bigger items. Right by the register they have them for sale, a dollar each. This goes first on the mini-Jestons walkway followed by the order in which the purchases should be stacked. Before she started scanning everything I haded her the one bag I brought myself. She opens it and commences to scan.

*BEEP*

One bag across the scanner - and she drops in in the other bag. What the fuck?!

I asked her what she was doing and she replied something to the effect of, "what do you mean?"
"I was planning on using the bag."
"Oh, you want to use it now?"
"Why else would I be buying it?"

I was greeted by a blank stare. Then the scanning/sacking process continued, poorly of course.

---------------------------------------------------

I found a blog that I really enjoy and thought you might too. It is a New York based stand-up comic named Myq Kaplan. The blog is called Godzillionaire and what he does is combine words, like "Godzilla" and "Zillionaire," and write a short comment about them. Sometimes they are long, sometimes short but they are steadily funny and poetic. Here is the most recent post:

Analogy.
Jesus.
Analogesus.

Water is to wine.

Brilliant! Check it out, yo!

I am getting sick of apartment living. For the most part I have been pretty lucky when it comes to the neighbors I have. Sure, a ton of them are annoying and I don't want to talk to them, but they are usually pretty respectful about noise levels and such. Occasionally I hear some shouting for whatever reason, most of it is in the stairwell and the rest is on the sidewalk by any number of other residents here.

I am looking around and trying to get a rent house when my lease is up in a couple of months and a huge selling point will be the garage. Hell, I'll even go for a private carport. Right now I have an assigned spot underneath a carport but people are always parking in my spot. Alright, actually they have been good recently... until today. There is not much I can do. I could do what my across-the-hall neighbors do and have them towed. My luck is they will get annoyed and mess with my car or something. People are stupid and I wouldn't put it past them. I have to live around these people, I don't want it to be complete hell. I just left a not under the person's windshield saying, "these are reserved parking spots, please do not park here."

I thought that was a decent way to handle the situation. A couple hours later the truck was gone, and I parked in my spot. My assigned space is far enough away from my apartment as it is, I hate having to find a visitor's space even farther away. It would be nice to come home with a backseat full of groceries (no, that is not a euphemism) and take them from the garage to the kitchen.

Soon. Hopefully soon.

This weekend is the annual North Texas Irish Festival. Dallas' Fair Park is overrun by Celtic music and crafts, along with people who are seasonally Irish (and the Ren-faire crowd). For all of the idiots out and about it is still quite a bit of fun usually. Caught the band Beoga tonight and their bodhran player is a four time world champion. Basically I feel like I should just give up now because I could never be that amazing.

The one group of people I cannot really stand or those in utilikilts. If you don't know what they are, here:


This is not a kilt. It is a skirt with pockets. These are not authentic to Scotland, or anywhere for that matter. Utilikilts are an American's creation when the guy made a skirt out of an old pair of military pants for working on his motorcycle. At least the people who run the company's website aren't completely delusional like their general consumer. In the website's FAQ they explain they are not "real kilts."

What really annoys the piss out of me is when someone wears one of the "It's not a skirt, it's a kilt" shirts with one of these bastard garments. I swear to Cthulhu himself by the time Scottish festival rolls around I will have made a shirt to wear that says something to the effect of, "Your utilikilt is nothing more than a cargo skirt."

Bah!

Lately I have been going on walks. Exercise is a good thing, and this, along with eating a little better, will help me lose some weight. Now I'm not overdoing it with the exercise. Fulci (my dog if you don't know) and I have been traveling approximately two miles (sometimes more, sometimes less) and we try to go everyday.

The dog has a tendency to get really excited when on his leash and try to run or pull me along. All this really accomplishes is choking him. After getting tired of him spending half of the trip wheezing and not learning from his mistakes I decided to get him one of those harnesses. There were size problems, but once it was all ironed out he put on the new harness this afternoon and looked so cute. There was no coughing today, everything went smoothly. Well, almost.

About halfway through our route we stumbled upon to unleashed, roaming big dogs. One of them was a lab mix of some kind and the other a very fluffy St. Bernard looking boy. The boy part I know for certain because his balls were hard to miss. I knew this could be trouble and as soon as they saw Fulci to us they ran. At first all they did was sniff him, but it soon became hard to walk. They were each about four times the size of my little puppy and he would stop when one of them was standing before him. Once I heard the first little growl I just picked him up and kept on trucking.

They just kept following us. There was a moment when we were down the street from them so I put Fulci back down. As soon as his paws hit the pavement they were on their way back. Bah! The fluffy dog had a tag so after much wrestling I finally had it and there was a phone number. With Fulci in one arm, and the other dog's collar in the other hand, I somehow eventually dialed the number on the bone shaped tag. It was a Vet's office. Sigh. I told her I wasn't aware this was a business number. The tag did not look like a rabies medallion, it was shaped like a bone, the same kind on my dog. Not knowing the area code which was on the dog's collar I asked, "Where is the 907 area code?"

Alaska.

What the hell?! I told her I was in Texas and she was as shocked as I was. During the conversation the two tag-alongs ran off towards the nearby duck pond to rustle some feathers. We hurried off and they never found us. Why the hell would you not put your home or cell number on your dog's tag? What good is an Alaskan veterinary office going to do in Texas?

I really hate hearing spoilers about TV shows or movies. I'm sure most people do, but it seems increasingly hard to escape them nowadays.

I understand if a movie has been out for quite a while, and you have not seen it that is no one's fault but your own. People cannot get mad at someone for saying Bruce Willis has been dead the whole movie and is a ghost. You had years to see The Sixth Sense. When the movie or show is pretty new it is a different story altogether.

To avoid all the details you must stay aways from certain websites, radio shows or even reading some blogs. If I am going to talk about anything spoiler-like I will use the ubiquitous "Spoiler Alert" tags before I begin, and the "End Spoilers" once I have finished. Is that too much to ask?

Things escalate to a different degree when you are dealing with something like Twitter. Tonight there were a few posts while someone on my Twitter list was watching Doubt. I did not get a chance to see this yet, and would like to be surprised. I don't know if anything was spoiled, but if I saw what I think I saw before I looked away then I'm annoyed. This is the same as someone not using spoiler tags on a message board. How do you protect yourself in a live atmosphere like that?

Most things celebrities do in their daily life don't really matter to me. Sure, I read the gossip on different blogs, but it never really changes anything about my existence.

When I first heard about this whole Rihanna/Chris Brown thing I felt bad for her. I don't really have a clue who Chris Brown is, other than a guy I went to UNT with, but I highly doubt this is the same guy. Her music is not my style, but I will admit she has some talent. It really sucks when people are in a horrible relationship where they are physically abused, not that a mental type of abuse is not bad either (on that note, check out the trailer for the documentary Must Read After My Death HERE ON APPLE'S SITE). Then I saw the picture...



Wow! He really did a number on her. The word through the grapevine was that she was not interested in talking to him at all and was pissed. Rightly so. This all changed late last night. A mere three weeks after Brown beat the shit out of her, Rihanna has begun to reconcile at Puff Daddy's house.

What?!

This is not 100% confirmed as far as I know, but there has also not been any statement from her publicist denying it either. If she really went back to him, she deserves everything she gets. Yes, it's hard to get away from relationships like this, but at the same time I am fairly certain all of her friends, not to mention most of the nation, are giving her sympathy. She has all the support anyone could want in this type of situation, and now she's going to throw it all away? What a fucking idiot. Not to mention the thousands, if not millions, of girls across the world who look up to her now think it is alright to try to make such a volatile relationship work.

"Well, Rihanna's giving him another chance and I think that's brave. I'm sure he can change." Let me let you in on a little secret - he won't change. He will get pissed off again and the same thing, if not worse, will happen. Maybe it will actually knock some sense into her.

I know I get annoyed easily, bitching and moaning over every little thing. The slightest inconvenience and I act like a fool. I have come to terms with my stupidity, but today I saw someone who is way worse than I have ever been.

The past week or so there have been some bank issues due to a deposit error so I've been trying to get everything back on track. I got a new check last night and went to deposit it as soon as I got home. The Chase bank near my apartment has an awesome deposit feature on the ATM, where it scans in the checks and prints their image on your transaction receipt. This gets rid of any problem with the bank saying they never got your deposit, at least I thought. Today I checked and it was not even showing a pending status on the deposit online, so off to Chase I drove.

When I arrived everyone was busy so I had to sign in and wait for the next available person, and there were two people ahead of me. No big deal, it is a little annoying but I just sat down to play Tetris on my phone. One pathetic game later I was still sitting, but I was next. By this time about five other people were now waiting alongside me. Most of them were quiet, but there was this woman who could not shut her mouth from the moment she entered the bank until I left. She did not have an account, but had a Chase issued cashier's check she wanted to cash. Because of this she had to wait for a manager to approve the transaction, and she did not like this at all.

"You're taking up my lunch break!"

"They don't care about their customers."

Once I was being helped the guy had to go check on something and said it would take him three minutes. He was gone probably around six minutes total. This woman must have been timing him, because about three minutes after he left I heard her behind me bitching, "that ain't no three minutes. He's gonna hear all about this when it's my turn." Sigh. While on my way out I heard her complaining to the customer service associate, while still not her turn in line, about how he was gone longer than three minutes. I just rolled my eyes and left.

Of course, she does work for Wal-Mart and they are all fucking morons anyway.

As probably everyone in the world knows by now, there was a woman who gave birth to octuplets less than a month ago. If this were a birth that just happened, like Apu and Manjula, it would be one thing, but to have it done artificially?!

News has come out since the birth about the shady situation surrounding Nadya Suleman's octo-birth. She is single, lives with her parents, oh, and she has six other kids! By now she knows how to handle it all by doing first thing most moms do after giving birth, get a public relations team. If that was not bad enough then we find out all of the, now, fourteen kids have been injected into her by a doctor. She was already on food stamps, of course, how the hell else is she going to pay for those kids? Three of her previously existing kids are disabled, so she gets government money for them, upwards of $2000+ per month. Her eight newborns are all in NICU, which will average to around $1 million when all is said and done. Where is this money going to come from? California tax payers.

Once the kids get home, I'm sorry to her parents' home, she plans on going back to school for her master's degree in ... wait for it ... child and adolescent counseling. HA! When would a mother of fourteen children have the time for school? Before she went back to school for her bachelor's degree she was a psychiatric technician. I don't think anyone who does this, then tells Ann Curry she's unfairly judged because she's a single mother should be counseling anyone. People aren't judging you because you're a single mother, it's because you're a single mother with fourteen fucking turkey baster injected kids!

I used to think that Duggar family with seventeen rugrats was disgusting, but at least they did it naturally and take care of them by themselves for the most part. Suleman is counting on her parents, both in their mid to late 60s, for all the help. I hope her mother can handle it since her father went back to his native Iraq to work as a translator and driver to support the brood.

People should not have kids when they cannot care for them. If they can't pay, keep your legs closed; or in this case, stop having a doctor shove handfuls of fertilized eggs in your uterus. This doctor is under review, and he should be slapped. If, no wait, when the many bills for these kids is put upon California residents they better have her uterus yanked, or her vagina sewn up.

I wonder why she's getting death threats? Those poor kids, it's a shame their mom is such a dumb bitch.


Maybe if I stare at this long enough the stomach will explode. I can only hope.

After watching some of the extra features on the new Blu-Ray release of the original Friday the 13th (finally uncut) I remember the worst part about going to conventions. It's awesome to see the stars of horror films you love and even hear them speak, well some of them, at a Q&A session. The problem comes with the idiot fans who don't pay attention or just ask/say stupid things.

One feature on the DVD is from a Friday the 13th reunion panel last year. Adrienne King is there with Tom Savini, Ari Lehman, Bestly Palmer (who looks remarkably like Jenny's mom), screenwriter Victor Miller and composer Harry Manfredini and they tell stories and answer questions. Pretty much what you would expect. Everything seems to be going smoothly until they show some schmuck in the audience who asks King if she can demonstrate her wonderful scream the producers loved so much when they cast her. Dear Lord, there is one in every group. They are not some sort of circus animal. Some con regulars will be happy to do this type of thing all the time, but they are attention whores. Cough, cough, Lehman, cough.

Even worse than the "dance monkey, dance" fan are those who don't pay attention. At a Malcolm McDowell Q&A I attended last year he was asked a question about some voice over work he did. He apologized to the young woman asking, but he, like most other actors not working solely in voice over, admitted those gigs are just an easy check. He goes in, reads what is on the page a few times and tells them to drop the check in the mail while on his way out the door. Not but maybe two questions later someone asked about the character he lends his voice to on Metalocalypse (great show by the way). The area I was sitting in seemed to collectively shake its head at the idiot who asked the question. I did feel a little better when McDowell's chastising of the fool for not paying attention was followed by applause from the rest of the room.

Another unenlightened group does so on a more personal level, at the autograph table. This can be better for everyone involved because there is not the public display for both parties when something stupid is asked or brought to the guest's attention. I have many examples of this but I'll stick with two I have seen/overheard while waiting for a chance to meet-and-greet with George A. Romero. One involves an imbecile who brought up a copy of the Resident Evil video game to be signed. It is true Romero was a heavy influence on the storyline of that game, but his ideas were never compensated. In other words he had no involvement with the project, and was a bit ripped off by it. The second instance, and the worst I've ever seen, was when this complete moron tossed a copy of Dawn of the Dead on the table to await an autograph. The only problem is it was the DVD of Zack Snyder's remake, which Romero was very much against.

Both dimwits did not get their items signed and seemed not to understand why he was a little peeved by their request (more so with the Dawn of the Dead fiasco). Why were they waiting in line if they obviously don't know anything about the man? Will these people ever learn?

While getting groceries out of my car earlier my downstairs neighbor came up to me to ask if I was home Saturday night. The reason - someone broke into her apartment. I know I'm probably a dork for thinking this, but it's a bit scary. Just to think if they would have gone up one more floor, to the third level, then it would have been me.

I have always kind of thought the good thing about being on the third floor is it acts as a deterrent for burglars. How many burglars really want to go through that much trouble? Sure, there are professional thieves who hit nice neighborhoods and such who would take the time to do a ton of planning, but where I live? This is a relatively ghetto area, lower income so most break-ins are probably from asshole petty criminals looking for electronics or things to pawn, so for those would they really carry a bunch of stuff down three flights of stairs? I would think they wouldn't, but I could most assuredly be wrong.

Even though my dog is small I wonder how much he would play in stopping a potential crook. If someone came up to my door, back or front, and started to make any noise would they stop when he began to bark? He barks at many noises outside the apartment, like people being too loud in the stairwell, or when I come home and fumble with my keys outside. I never really thought of Fulci as a guard dog, but he just might do the trick.

I can't even imagine how I would feel about someone stealing my stuff. I have renter's insurance and most of my stuff could be replaced, but it is a hassle. What if they took stuff I couldn't replace like my computer full of files, pictures and others? Not only would I be extremely pissed, but then there is the whole violation of personal space to consider. When I was young, about three or so, and my sister was still just a baby we came home with my mom and burglars were in the house. Luckily we scared them away, and while I don't remember if they actually got anything my mother was pretty shaken up by the whole ordeal. It could have turned really bad, really quick.

It's just a scary thing to think about.

This is not some post about how I don't understand the youth of today with their music, clothes or choices in, well, anything. It could easily become one of those posts, but I don't feel like taking the time to write it all. This is more on the subject of how actually stupid teens can be. My mother works at a high school, the same one I went to, and she was telling me this story over dinner last weekend.

Our scene opens on a tenth grade English class. The date - January 20, 2009. The classroom's attention was focused on the TV where Barack Obama was soon to be sworn in as President of the United States. While the kids watched the teacher was minding her own business when a question was asked that stopped her dead in her tracks. "Where is all of this taking place?" The teacher looked at the student, then up to the TV where the Nation's Capitol building was prominent. She told the girl there was a vote and they decided to have it in Las Vegas this year. She didn't think it looked like Nevada, then another student corrected her, "no, Vegas is in Utah."

Oh. My. God.

So in this kind of situation who do you blame? Has the school system failed, have the parents or are the kids just plain idiots? How do you live to be fifteen and not know what the Capitol looks like? It's on money for fuck's sake!